The
Tomb of Nebamun is the burial place of a middle-ranking official from the
Eighteenth Dynasty of Egypt who lived around 1350 BCE and worked at the vast temple complex near
Thebes. The richly decorated tomb was discovered in 1820 by a young Greek, Giovanni d'Athanasi, an agent for the English Egyptologist
Henry Salt. Portions of the plaster
frescoes were hacked off the walls and sold to the
British Museum the following year. This polychrome fragment depicts date palms, sycamore trees, and a pool teeming with life. D'Athanasi died in poverty without revealing the precise location of the tomb.
Painting credit: unknown; photographed by Yann Forget